Community | November 07, 2009 | 20 comments

The Politics of Seeds: 75% of the Seed Marketplace Controlled by Four Companies

source: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/11/the-politics-of-seeds.php

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Excerpt:
"Dupont, Monsanto, Syngenta, and Groupe Limagrain control 75 percent of the seed marketplace and this Saturday at 9:00 am pst, Michael Olson's Food Chain Radio hosts Steve Hixson from Steve's Seed Conditioning to discuss the politics of seeds. Currently, Monsanto and Dupont are going head to head for a bigger piece of the seed profit pie.

So what exactly does such dominance mean for our nation's food chain? With four massive corporations controlling the marketplace, it undoubtedly will have repercussions for the food industry. I wrote back in
September that farmers are essentially giving up the wheel to corporate entities that research, develop, and mass produce seeds. Tracts of land planted with commercial seeds are pushing out local crop varieties and erasing the knowledge gained from 10,000 years of farming."
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/11/the-politics-of-seeds.php





I will always quote this, it is so true:

" Societies and economies can be destroyed by bombs. Societies can also be destroyed by locking every aspect of life like provision of food and water through an economic war.”
By Vandana Shiva


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20 comments // The Politics of Seeds: 75% of the Seed Marketplace Controlled by Four Companies

  • Monkey_Films
    • 0
      Monkey_Films  

    • Thank you, Opit, very impressive list. I have saved it for myself. Now, I have to find time to cram some more information into this skull with your provided reading. Thanks a lot, lol.

    • 2 years ago
  • opit
  • opit
  • twohawks
    • 0
      twohawks  
    • opit:

      Quite the collection, Opit. There is an article there about distraction. Its a bit long (need to make some time for that), I presume you were intending me/us to find that?

    • 2 years ago
  • Monkey_Films
    • 0
      Monkey_Films  

    • twohawks you are exactly right on how they get us to pick sides keeping the brain fighting for a partisan 'side' of the fight, all the while we miss the man behind the curtain.

    • 2 years ago
  • twohawks
    • 0
      twohawks  

    • I need to check out your blog later, opit.. but I want to say... since seed control has been an industry since about, what, the 1920's I think (off the top), and major controls were being layed down in the 60's in other country's (like India and Australia, and several opthers) just prior to major seed control reforms ramping up in the 70's in the US... it has been ingrained in the people's minds that this is an important way of safeguarding and managing our crops and food supply. By the time the big corporates started to dominate the situation, slowly thru the last several decades, well that has become natural too.
      So yeah, voices crying out about it are quite simply dismissed without any thought... that is, until GMO is directly related to mutating babies in a whole town or something... oh wait, we have had other disasters disparate whole towns, and nations... and we have done practically nothing about it.

      Oops... a little pessimism dropping in there, eh...
      I generally believe in not getting too pessimistic, it generates fear, prejudice, and all sorts of things I would rather not participate in 'creating' with others. But the ugly stuff still has to get stated, and yep, this is pretty core stuff... I mean as core as shifting the currency 'round the planet, big corporate oil$$ lust, etc... so I think its realistic to tie those things in.

      Like I was alluding to before, some of the most intelligent folks I have known were really making a big stink about this back in the 70's... tying it in as one of the most significant things we would be facing in several decades, and here we are, and its in your face, and people don't want to know about it.

      ======================
      A thought crosses my mind... I cannot help but think that bi-partisan societal construct patterns the people's minds to always "take sides" and then discount the what would then be considered the 'opposite thing', 'causing people to compromise otherwise natural abilities for processing information in a more holistic, and independent manner.

      Balh, blah.. its a shame we don't see more people reading this thread and others like it. Thank goodness for perseverant voices, such as Jan's, to keep putting in our faces.

    • 2 years ago
  • opit
    • 0
      opit  
    • Image

    • I blogged a note on monopolist control of water supply month ago and backed it with news notes as they came through. The Panelist, for instance, had an article on how Iraq's thousands of years old seed stocks were destroyed by Bremer's 100 Orders and mandating Monsanto seeds. These days Turkey is cutting off their water supply in a drought. In India and Africa farmers are committing suicide because they can't pay off their debts incurred buying controlled seeds.
      JanforGore has blogged all kinds of articles on water and seeds at the group blogging items on water and attacks on its supply here.. The horror continues into prions - precursor to virii which cause Jacobs-Cruzfeld/Mad Cow diseases - being recycled by spreading feces onto cropland. In fact, there are well over 100 viruses put into the food supply the same way.
      The meat supply is dysfunctional beyond belief - and is based on a system of monoculture sure to eventually fail catastrophically due to natural causes.
      Corporate farming was pioneered under Nelson Rockefeller and implemented in central and South America in the 1940's. Farming was destroyed.
      Fertilizer is based on the use of oil based chemicals. Strange ancient organisms - primitive life - are invading our environment. If you introduce that sort of threat into a closed system, you will destroy the ecology.
      Check out deaths of oil spill cleanup crews to cancer.
      Then think of the literally 1000's of strange chemicals introduced into our environment in past decades. What an assault on the body's defences !
      That stuff has all lead to strange conditions and diseases.
      But hey. Environmentalists are alarmists and unrealistic idealists, right ?
      The Movie HOME by the Home Project on YouTube is still basic orientation for those of you who haven't seen it yet.
      http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2009/07/water-wealth-power.html

    • 2 years ago
  • royulery
  • Monkey_Films
    • 0
      Monkey_Films  

    • Excellent point, controlusplease. I personally believe the best Revolution we could have in this country is a Consumer Revolution. The bad guys are the corporations that have enough money to buy our government out from under us. If we chose to buy only from small mom and pops, small call dealerships or non-chain stores owned by someone local we could essentially take the wind out of their sails. No money coming in means no lobbyists in Washington. All the while we would be spreading the wealth more evenly which makes a Democracy run better anyway.

    • 2 years ago
  • controlusplease
    • 0
      controlusplease  

    • the thing is, almost everything is controlled by corporations and their monopolies, ever since the industrial revolution, small mom and pop places have been going because they just cant compete
      buy local, no matter what it is you need

    • 2 years ago
  • Monkey_Films
    • 0
      Monkey_Films  

    • Believe it or not, this was done by plan and is connected to the whole one world government setup. Control the food, control the people. A little prophecy here it goes...Swine Flu jumps from people to pigs, pig stocks are wiped out creating food shortage combined with the dollar dropping, inflation rising, violence erupting as people start losing it and an engineered flu to kill off a few hundred thousand and voila, you have to call martial law to enforce vaccinations and quarantine towns. This leads us into a situation where our only salvation is to join the One World Government who will then forgive all of our government's debts and leave us poor, beaten down and relying on our 'elected' saviors to save us from total ruin. That is, if history is any lesson.

    • 2 years ago
  • Monkey_Films
    • 0
      Monkey_Films  
    • Image

    • Yes, very scary. Check out Dr. Rima Laibow on naturalnews.com or her videos on youtube along with her husband Maj. General Albert Stubblebine of the US Army. They get into more detail on this and related subjects and it will haunt you.

    • 2 years ago
  • twohawks
    • 0
      twohawks  
    • Image

    • Good Post, lmp, thanks. I couldn't help but think back to the 70's when I was hearing projections about how all this seeds control was suspected to take place over the next couple decades. I punched in seeds control 1970 into the googlebar and, well, I thought I'd share... (check out some of these articles)...

      Oct, 2007
      http://www.ruralliving.co.nz/cms/regulars/out_in_the_Garden/2007/10/art100079.ph...
      "Three corporations now control quarter of the world seed markets. The motivation behind genetic engineering, while advertised as the desire to increase crop yields and decrease pesticide use (because the pesticide would be grown inside the plant) was only secondary. Once a seed has been successfully modified it can then be patented, and thus controlled. That company can ensure that the seed is not saved by the farmer from one year to the next, but new seed must be purchased for each crop."

      (Does that mean its gone from a quarter to three-quarter in the span of a few years?!)

      ~1999
      http://www.primalseeds.org/corporation.htm
      "Since 1970 multinational companies have bought or taken control of nearly a thousand, once independent, seed companies. The purchase of Pioneer Hi-Bred in 1999, the world's largest seed company, for $7.7 billion by Du-Pont, is part of a trend of concentration of power in the life sciences industry. The $23 billion global seed trade is now dominated by a handful of giant corporations. "

      Context of '1980s-2004: Monsanto Secures Several Hundred Biotech Patents on Plants
      http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=gm-18
      "This is a scalable context timeline. It contains events related to the event 1980s-2004: Monsanto Secures Several Hundred Biotech Patents on Plants. You can narrow or broaden the context of this timeline by adjusting the zoom level. The lower the scale, the more relevant the items on average will be, while the higher the scale, the less relevant the items, on average, will be."

      http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/engdahl/2006/0828.html
      "Monsanto buys 'Terminator' seeds company

      by F. William Engdahl
      Author, Guest contributor
      August 28, 2006

      The United States Government has been financing research on a genetic engineering technology which, when commercialized, will give its owners the power to control the food seed of entire nations or regions. The Government has been working quietly on this technology since 1983. Now, the little-known company that has been working in this genetic research with the Government’s US Department of Agriculture-- Delta & Pine Land-- is about to become part of the world’s largest supplier of patented genetically-modified seeds (GMO), Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis, Missouri."

      "It’s about handing over control of the seeds for mankind’s basic food supply—rice, corn, soybeans, wheat, even fruit, vegetables and cotton—to privately owned corporations. Once the seeds and their use are patented and controlled by one or several private agribusiness multinationals, it will be they who can decide whether or not a particular customer—let’s say for argument, China or Brazil or India or Japan—whether they will or won’t get the patented seeds from Monsanto, or from one of its licensee GMO partners like Bayer Crop Sciences, Syngenta or DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred International."

      "Doctor Who" The Seeds of Death: Episode 6 (1969)
      http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0811344/
      ::ahem:: sorry... kind of went off there...

    • 2 years ago
  • lordsbassman
    • 0
      lordsbassman  

    • my garden was organic and un-sterilized to bad a family of woodchucks just started living in our yard this summer after our dog passed...

    • 2 years ago
  • vesher
  • artemis6
  • Maitereya
    • 0
      Maitereya  

    • watch 'food inc.' theres a piece about monsanto and farmers keeping seed for next season. Since monsanto owns the 'roundup ready' soy bean farmers arent allowed to keep the seed for some reason. Monsanto has a patent on a form of life.

    • 2 years ago
  • csmonut
    • 0
      csmonut  

    • Let's hope the people win.
      How to wake them up...that is a conundrum.

      BTW...I post these articles on my on-line news site. But since they have changed the format of current, I don't put it here because it wants to leave a picture, and I don't have a picture. Guess I'll have to figure this one out:))

    • 2 years ago
  • melynda
  • Achechew
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